


Traced in the shadow an indecipherable cause

by Ani



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-15
Updated: 2012-04-15
Packaged: 2017-11-03 16:36:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/383598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ani/pseuds/Ani
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The experience,” Sherlock told John, “ is one of infringement. Like being in water that is too hot. Your skin screams, mind panics, but to turn and thrash in your environment for relief is only to find more pain. It is also intensely pleasurable. Like the moment of anticipation before orgasm. A fizzling, boundless, drunken indulgence. It is like the air is cream and music melts into taste and colors hum chorus.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Traced in the shadow an indecipherable cause

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from Wallace Steven's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and can be read [here](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174503).

The light is rustling purple today. That’s what Sherlock whispers into John’s ear, sadly, with pleading. John shakes himself from sleep and find it’s still nighttime, but he gets up to help Sherlock anyway. To remove the sheets and place the cold cloth blinder over Sherlock’s eyes. Sherlock fumbles out of his shirt and then slips it back on. “Do you want any music?” John asks. “Yes,” Sherlock says, “something of snow. And lighter than wine.” John hesitates for a few minutes, closing the curtains, before choosing  Gymnopédie No. 1. Sherlock hums happily and nestles into John’s back when John returns to bed. Neither of them sleep perfectly but it will do.  


  
  
*  
People say you can tell Sensates by their eyes. That the colors are fluid, or stare startling, or captivating to drown in. When he was born Sherlock had grey eyes and blue eyes and green eyes. His mother had concerns. She kept his room simple, his clothing light. But they weren’t sure until he sat down for breakfast one morning and told Mycroft, “Your thoughts sound like oranges”. Oranges sound self-satisfied and plump, an older Sherlock would bite. Mycroft had received news from university that day but had yet to tell anybody. “That explains all his crying as a baby,” Mummy had said, but Mycroft thought Sherlock was unrelatedly annoying. Sherlock will someday say that his umbrella sounds pompous and that the teacakes are begging amnesty. It perturbs Mycroft that he doesn’t always know what’s true. He’ll eat the teacakes anyway.  


  
  
*  
“The experience,” Sherlock told John, “ is one of infringement. Like being in water that is too hot. Your skin screams, mind panics, but to turn and thrash in your environment for relief is only to find more pain. It is also intensely pleasurable. Like the moment of anticipation before orgasm. A fizzling, boundless, drunken indulgence. It is like the air is cream and music melts into taste and colors hum chorus.”

  
“How do you concentrate?” he asks. He brushes Sherlock hair back. Sensates are extremely rare and do not like to share, as a rule. This conversation, strewn sweaty and naked and warm, is the last tall boundary of the sea. 

  
“I learned to. I see and I hear and I feel and I taste and from the available information analyze, discard, and observe the relevant. I limit my exposure to the unnecessary. And I keep my mind occupied. It improves my skills and keeps my mind focused, to drown out the buzzing, to do what I am interested in instead of the gold lint on the walls and the cascading ripples of the blanket turning into wave and froth and the precise milliliter of tea left in the cup by your bed and everything that is  _boring_.”

  
“And when you can’t?”

  
“Then I drown it out with drugs.”   
  


  
*  
They go out for Chinese after their first case. The table is sticky and red paint peeling but the food is excellent, spicy and smoky peppered beef and fried rice with carrots that pop and shrimp rangoon that drips creamy and piquant and green-black tea that smells like a pine forest after rain. They laugh together. They talk. It seems like it is going well but then Sherlock gets agitated. Keeps staring at John like he is trying to peel him open. Finally he reaches out and touches John’s left knuckles with his hand and then curses loudly.

  
“What is  wrong?”

  
“I can’t read you,” Sherlock says, with a growl.

  
“What, you can’t tell if I’m going to take the last cup of tea based on my eyebrows? Because I am.”

  
“No. No,” Sherlock says, “you are simple to deduce. But I can’t see, inside, you don’t sound like anything,  I don’t taste caution or remorse, not even a hint of black liquorice, you’re like a black box, I can’t - I can’t  _sense_ you.”

  
“And that’s bad?” John asks, because at this point he still doesn’t know.

  
“No,” Sherlock responds. He sounds surprised. He sits back, blinks. “No. No, actually, that is exquisite.”   
  


 

  
*  
John can turn it off. John remains a mystery. John blocks out the world. “You are my personal Faraday cage,” Sherlock says happily. He drowns himself in John’s flesh. When it becomes too much he curls up against him and shuts his eyes and hisses, but John rubs his back and turns down the environment and what was screeching metal rubbing iron on his skin rain becomes a soft blue drizzle and what was grating sugar and gnawing on his teeth becomes what it actually is, just the sound of an infant crying in the background, or the bloom of lilac and hydrangea. 

  
Sherlock reaches for him constantly. Too many people are speaking, and he takes John’s hand; there’s the wrong music, and he sighs and rests his head on John’s shoulder.

  
Sometimes they splash in blood. Sometimes the house reeks of bleach. John understands discomfort on a level that rises above the disagreeable and takes ahold of your gut, of your throat, of your rational functioning. He lives with the bags of fingers and the screeching violin because Sherlock lives with a world that is, he says, “always screaming pink-orange at me when I want to rest and tastes like calcium and sounds like chalk tapping and the smell of your hair is the only thing I can stand today.” 

  
Sherlock does it because it provides a gift. He could  _not_ deal with it. He could blank out in the shaking spiral stairs of cocaine. But instead he wakes up every day, dreaming of wool and quiet, and tries to ignore the flesh and the noise in order to do what other people cannot.

  
He tastes guilt in a footprint. He notices the position of a book and the location of an overturned shoe and it leads in a carnival whirl of thought to the rescue of a kidnapped child. He walks into the brightest boldest crashing narrow places of life to bring back a shining justice of, if no resolution, if no help, at least truth. And if Sherlock can do that John can put up with a lot too.

  
John, of course, is blessed for his troubles.   


  


*  
Many Sensates abuse drugs. Some commit suicide. Some go mad. Some become hermits. Others live in the busiest of cities and hang daisies on their neck and offer to love anyone who needs it. Some claim to see the future. Many read minds.

  
The history is troubled, riddled with superstition, lacking study and understanding. Sherlock lets John take notes and create reports. He sees it as no different than the blogging. “The addition of your data will be worthy,” he says, “although I’ll need to review it before you show it to anyone.” He is playing the same three notes over and over and over again. John lets him because in a few minutes Sherlock will bolt up and say “the bridge!” and they will find a murderer.  
  


 

  
*  
Sherlock enjoys it. He enjoys knowing what no one else can. He enjoys seeing what is obvious only after he unveils it, like a magician as true scientist. He enjoys knowing what people do not want to confess but what is carried on their tongues into a vibration of speech that coils into smoky pattern. And he enjoys the experience. Never always, but sometimes. “This paint is delicious,” he’ll say, breathily. “Do you hear that? The peppermint?” John learns the skull looks like comforting piano. That tobacco is indescribably delicious, like a slow sunrise, like rich earth and crisp new lines.  


 

  


*  
It can make Sherlock cruel. He blasts through the world like shuddering doors and crumples emotions as tissue. He says he has no time to care about feelings because he is too busy feeling everyone's annoying cares. John knows it is because he's so overwhelmed. John knows he's still being an prig. John walks behind him and sooths and steps in front to put a stop on Sherlock too. Sherlock responds to John's leashing gratefully. To the encouragement, and the commands, the praise and the demands. Sherlock pays attention to his clear lines in the blinding world and John does everything to make it possible. And when John cannot do everything, he says so, and he knows Sherlock would let the world burn if it meant pausing for John. John is relief and relief is a shadow of trees on a hot day, a covering of branches in the rain, strong roots and the smell of growth. John is care and care tastes like cool pillows and fresh sheets and new tea. Sherlock attempts to balance between self-preservation and rudeness for the first time in his life. He is generally awful at it but John forgives him and forgiveness sounds like powder and aloe and tastes soft. When Sherlock is good at caring he is as good at it as he is good at everything else, that is, absolutely brilliant. And caring also tastes like clove and and sounds like the rush of a gentle sigh and feels like the moment when his eyes meet with John's and it is because John is about to kiss him.

 

 

 

*

Sherlock introduces music to John. Music history, “proper taste”. John does not feel anything was wrong with his previous taste, but he’ll take recommendations. But most of all Sherlock introduces music as a liquid world. Each note in a transparent thimble, a stream of sound and image and impression. This song is grey and there are black ribbons and it ripples with defining edges. This song is a warm gold that glows on glass edges. This song tastes like bitter beer and dark chocolate. But then the courante drips sweet grass. Sherlock creates teacup universes with his violin that only he can live in. But he can describe them, to John, the cave-like melody of wings and rushes and the swelling murmuration or the bewegt birth of a sun or the sweet gold aubade or the adagio which is always a lake at night with moon and the darkness and cruelty of a fugue and how glissando is beautiful to say in itself, like dandelion, or eye, or cellar door.  
  


  
*  
One night they argue about the taste of yellow. Sherlock insists he is right because John is incapable of amassing the evidence himself. John responds that Sherlock has no way of validating his impression of the subject by hard evidence. Sherlock hits him with a pillow. John hits him back. When Sherlock grabs his hips and kisses him and says, happily, “You taste like toothpaste,” it is only because John has just brushed his teeth.  


 

  
*  
Sometimes it becomes too much. Sometimes it presses on Sherlock like a gasp on the chest, like a wasp sting that burns red through his bones, like a sore throat that rasps blood, like an ocean of black space he is drowning in and it is full, full, full and he wants to be empty, empty, just empty, and he cannot be because it is filling his closed eyes and blocked ears until he screams and the screaming makes it worse.

  
During those times, John will take care of him. He will turn off the lights and remove noise and help him undress. He’ll keep people away. He’ll play just the right music. He’ll make it soothingly cool or pleasingly warm, run a bath or remove even the breeze across Sherlock’s skin. The only thing Sherlock wants then is John.

  
John, John, John. You are the only thing that is stable, he says, the only mystery, the only unseen, the only object quiet and remote and so beautifully touchable. You are the only one I could want. You are the only one I could need.

  
In times like this, like tonight, when the starlight is horrifically purple, and John can’t understand but does what Sherlock needs, Sherlock says he needs because he cannot understand. “But I also need you because I love you,” he whispers, in John’s ear, and traces pictures on his back. They might be triangles that taste like cold chess pieces or circles that hum or squiggles that smell like cinnamon. They might just be blissful empty shapes. And Sherlock will fall into John before they must again venture into the world and feel everything and do what is necessary and what is right.   


 

  


*  
“I am a Sensate,” Sherlock tells John that first night.

  
“What it is like?”

  
“Like a crack in the lens of a microscope.”

  
John waits for him to say more.

  
“Like something constant and distracting. But I cannot imagine my life without it.”

  
“Ah,” John says. “I understand.”


End file.
